Brendan Nyhan

Grover Norquist in the New York Times Week in Review on Sunday:

“There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.”

Grover Norquist in the Washington Post, April 10, 2003:

“‘The Democrats were on the wrong side of the Civil War, the Cold War and now the Iraq War,’ said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an all-purpose chest-thumper on matters Right Wing. ‘Their batting average on these things is right up there with France.’”

As far as I can tell from searching Nexis, Norquist didn’t say anything negative about Iraq until October 24, 2004, when he was

“Bush lost because of Iraq – O.K., but that doesn’t suggest a change in policy because Iraq was not central to any part of the Republican party or its philosophy,” said Grover Norquist, a leading conservative and the president of Americans for Tax Reform. “It was a judgment call. It may have been a good idea, it may have been a bad idea. So the Republican party will decide not to do more Iraqs. If you weren’t the president, you weren’t doing Iraqs anyway. The party will continue to be anti-tax and push for more. We will still be the deregulation party, and still the free trade party.”

Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon, two of the founders of the latest useless online political forum, Hotsoup.com, published a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed yesterday hyping the third party threat for 2008:

An analysis of exit polls from the 2004 presidential election reveal that while the percentage of ticket-splitting voters has decreased every election since 1988, there is a large bloc – as many as a third of the electorate – that votes straight-ticket Republican or Democratic even though they are not philosophically suited for either party.

Voters in this squishy middle are not necessarily ideological cousins (it would be wrong to call this a moderate middle), but they are united by their shared frustration with the political system.

Call them the “disenchanted middle,” ripe for the plucking by a third-party insurgency in 2008 or a candidate who reforms his or her party from within.

But there will almost surely not be a serious third-party insurgency in 2008 for the reasons I have outlined over and over. This is just an easy way to make normal political discontent seem dramatic. In particular, note that, as Lockhart and McKinnon acknowledge, “the percentage of ticket-splitting voters has decreased every election since 1988.” That’s one of many reasons it would be hard for a third-party candidate to win.

As The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait explained back in June, the right has been constructing a narrative in which the failures of President Bush are attributed to a lack of adherence to “real” conservatism, which by definition can never fail politically or substantively. In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal tries the same approach to explaining away the defeat of the GOP Congress on Tuesday.

First, the WSJ claims “big government conservatism” is a losing proposition and voters prefer fewer government services:

Here’s one telling exit poll result: In battleground districts, only one in five voters said Republicans would do a better job to “keep government spending under control”; almost twice as many voters said Democrats would do a better job. Yet this week a separate poll found that 59% of Americans still favor fewer government services and lower taxes compared with 28% who favor more government services and higher taxes. “Big government conservatism” was a nice think-tank proposition; it merely lacks support from actual voters.

Setting aside the irony of the WSJ citing a poll that acknowledges the tradeoff between government expenditures and taxes (contradicting the newspaper’s own position on the revenue effect of tax cuts), the finding is useless — voters typically are anti-government in the abstract, but want more spending on specific, popular programs. President Bush didn’t pass the hideous prescription drug bill because he wanted to; he did so because seniors were demanding one. It’s a delusion to suggest voters are rejecting conservatives for failing to cut government sufficiently. The Republicans tried that in 1995 and have been running away from it ever since.

The WSJ also attributes the failure of President Bush’s unpopular plan to create private accounts in Social Security to a lack of will on the part of top Republicans in Congress:

President Bush gave Republicans a once-in-a-generation chance to reform Social Security and health care along free market lines, but GOP House leaders fought him behind the scenes. For this alone, they should be returned to the backbenches.

This of course gets it precisely backward. I’m sure Hastert and friends would have loved to pass private accounts, but they fought Bush’s proposal behind the scenes because it was deeply unpopular. There was no “once-in-a-generation chance” to pass private accounts; the votes were never there.

Do WSJ readers actually believe this nonsense?

Update 11/10 2:57 PM: Jon Chait wrote a similar post on TNR’s blog The Plank, and Noam Scheiber has a new TNR Online piece on the subject as well.

I think Kevin Drum gets it right — despite the inevitable effort to spin some sort of “soccer mom”-type fable out of the election, it was an almost pure anti-GOP swing that cut across demographic lines:

Here’s the baseline: the overall Democratic share of the congressional vote was about 5 percentage points higher than in 2004. And what you find from the exit polls is that Dems gained 2-7 points in practically every demographic group surveyed. It was an across-the-board sweep, not a victory that depended on any single big electoral shift.

So were there any big changes? Compared to the overall 5-point gain, did Dems get a bigger share of the white evangelical vote? No. Women? No. Young people? No. Low-income voters? No. Self-described conservatives? No. Suburban voters? No. The South? No. The Northeast? No. Any region? No. Dems gained a steady 2-7 points in all these groups.

Now that Nancy Pelosi is officially Speaker, she faces the tough choice of whom to appoint as Intelligence Committee chair, which the media is already starting to focus on:

Many Democrats are closely watching the decision for signs of two things: how the speaker-in-waiting will chart her party’s course on national security issues and how she will handle her first postelection test in dealing with the often fractious Democratic caucus.

“This is the battle that nobody wanted,” one senior Democratic strategist said. “For Nancy to start off her speakership with a fight is a great shame.”

As I’ve written (here and here), there is no way Pelosi should appoint Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who was removed from the bench by the Senate for bribery and perjury, as the new Intelligence chair. The problem is that she’ll be in trouble with the powerful Congressional Black Caucus if she doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Congressional Quarterly reports that Hastings’ “expertise is otherwise uncontested.” Maybe he does have the relevant substantive knowledge. But, as CQ notes, “Democrats and intelligence professionals” fear that Hastings “would become a lightning rod for the GOP,” stalling “the already slow pace of reforming the spy agencies.” No kidding. Will the Democrats recognize that this issue threatens to become the equivalent of gays in the military? Do they want Hastings to become a symbol of how the new Democratic majority is captive to its liberal base and not serious about national security?

One of my mentors at Duke, David Rohde, made a great point in an interview (Real Video) about the election with the Duke communications staff:

Certainly the most striking outcome last night was Rhode Island. The exit polls in Rhode Island showed that the approval rating of the Republican incumbent, Lincoln Chafee, was 62 percent. 62 percent of the people who went to the polls approved of the job that Lincoln Chafee did, and they voted him out of office because he would have voted with the Republicans to organize the Senate. Tip O’Neill said all politics is local. Well, they weren’t local last night. Politics last night were national.

Update 11/10 9:13 AM: The Economist’s Democracy in America blog suggests that the Chafee result means that it means “voters know something about how their government works.”

Check out this hilariously convoluted argument on Power Line for why the GOP had a mandate in 1994, but Democrats don’t now:

There is another difference, though, between 1994 and 2006. In 1994, the Republicans ran on a platform, the Contract with America. Their victory therefore gave them a mandate, notwithstanding that many voters were vaguely aware (if at all) of the Contract. This year, the Democrats ran as non-Republicans. They made a deliberate decision not to take an issue on the biggest issue of the day, the Iraq war, and they downplayed (at least in competitive races) their intention to raise taxes and take other unpopular measures.

Let me get this straight. In 1994, Republicans had a mandate even though most voters barely knew that the Contract with America existed. Why? Because they “ran on a platform.” But Democrats didn’t run on a platform this time. Why? Because they didn’t “take an issue” (I think he means position) on Iraq and “downplayed … their intention to raise taxes and take other unpopular measures.”

There are so many problems with this reasoning it’s hard to know where to begin. Why would we believe that the GOP got a mandate in 1994 when their platform was largely unknown to voters? By that standard, the House Democrat manifesto “A New Direction for America” has a plausible claim to a mandate even though voters knew almost nothing about it. Did Democrats downplay or ignore divisive issues like how to deal with Iraq and how to restore fiscal balance? Of course. But the House Republicans certainly didn’t emphasize their intentions to cut planned Medicare spending or take other unpopular steps during the 1994 campaign.

In a larger sense, the whole mandate debate can’t be resolved because there is no objective definition of the term. Anyone who has studied social choice theory knows that aggregating individual preferences over policy choices is nearly impossible. As I wrote back in 2004, the best work on mandates in political science defines them as a social construction — essentially, a collective interpretation of election results that carries an informational signal to nervous incumbents worried about re-election. That doesn’t make them any less real as a political phenomenon, however. If people believe a mandate exists, it appears to matter. This time around, though, almost no one is actually arguing that Democrats have one.

Update 11/13 8:23 AM: OpinionJournal’s Brendan Miniter makes a similar claim:

This year Democrats benefited from a voter rebellion against the GOP. But the party did not win a mandate for its legislative agenda, for the simple reason that Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and others did not lay out their own Contract With America.

The verdict of the political futures market on the 2008 presidential race is clear: Hillary Clinton and John McCain are heavy favorites.

The futures contracts on Clinton and
McCain winning their respective party’s nominations have trended upward over the past week to prices that reflect a 55% predicted probability of victory. McCain, in particular, surged in the wake of his party’s losses on Tuesday:

Meanwhile, Barack Obama looks extremely well positioned for a run against Clinton. His favorability ratings are excellent – CNN just put them at 36% favorable, 11% unfavorable. Those will slide once he comes under attack, but it’s a remarkable starting point.

In addition, the grassroots are clearly passionate about him — Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope (which I haven’t read) has become a #1 bestseller:

Propelled by a potent publicity cocktail of “60 Minutes,” “Today,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and major magazine covers, Senator Barack Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope,” seemed primed for best-selling status.

But its rapid rise to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction list next Sunday, placing the author, the freshman Democratic senator from Illinois, ahead of heavyweight authors like John Grisham, Bill O’Reilly and even Bob Woodward, is something of a publishing stunner.

Since it went on sale Oct. 17, the book has sold 182,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which accounts for about 60 to 70 percent of a new hardcover book’s sales by tracking purchases at large booksellers like Barnes & Noble, online retailers and independent bookstores. Mr. Obama’s publisher, Crown Publishers, said the book is in its seventh printing, with 860,000 copies in circulation.

This is once-in-a-generation stardom. He’d be crazy not to take a shot at the presidency.

How crazy are the Wikipedia wars? As soon as I heard Bush announce Robert Gates as his nominee for Secretary of Defense, I pulled up Gates’s entry on Wikipedia and — eerily — it already named him as Bush’s nominee. A minute later I tried to go back to the page and it had been defaced. About another minute later, I hit reload and it had been locked to edits by new users.

Bush is nominating Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Given the administration’s history of postmodern intelligence analysis, this 1991 article on the debate over his performance at CIA is disconcerting:

[T]he Gates period produced a rash of complaints that, on controversial issues like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Iran, the agency tailored its reports to fit White House policy rather than providing objective conclusions. In the world of intelligence analysis, that is the ultimate sin.

Sounds like he’ll fit right in!

Also, here’s the conclusion to the Walsh Iran / Contra Report’s chapter on Gates, who was a subject of the investigation:

Independent Counsel found insufficient evidence to warrant charging Robert Gates with a crime for his role in the Iran/contra affair. Like those of many other Iran/contra figures, the statements of Gates often seemed scripted and less than candid. Nevertheless, given the complex nature of the activities and Gates’s apparent lack of direct participation, a jury could find the evidence left a reasonable doubt that Gates either obstructed official inquiries or that his two demonstrably incorrect statements were deliberate lies.

Even if he wasn’t charged, how many Iran-Contra figures do we need in the executive branch? Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte and Otto Reich weren’t enough?